Duchovny the director never bothers to ground his melodrama in something that feels real, missing the target on the period in which it’s set and an honest understanding of the people who live and die on the success and failure of their favorite teams.

Duchovny’s smarts are commendable, theoretically, but the movie falls short of compelling. And for all the novelistic details that he packs in, “Reverse the Curse” moves at the pace of a self-defeating snail.

Even though that ending includes an epilogue we could see coming like a hanging change-up right down the middle, you can’t help but choke up...

Material that likely plays better on the page than on the screen with too many gaps in its logic and ends too flatly to land with the emotional arc it seeks.